---
title: "A Moderated Screencast: Enterprise Cobol for z/OS 5.1"
date: 2013-09-12T13:55:41Z
modified: 2013-09-12T13:55:41Z
permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/a-moderated-screencast-enterprise-cobol-for-zos-5-1/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: ""
wpid: 4017
categories:
  - IBM
timestamp: 2013-09-12T13:55:41Z
tags:
  - IBM
---

IBM mainframes have always been great at backwards compatibility, but the compatibility comes at a price. While an app developed many years ago will generally run faster on the very latest systems hardware and software, it won’t be able to take advantage of the latest features- such as XML or Java acceleration through algorithms or specialist processors. With a major refresh of its compiler however IBM has addressed this issue, so that now mainframe applications can offer what I like to call forwards compatibility, often through a straightforward recompile. Cobol just got more useful – supporting modern data structures and bringing significant performance improvements. In mainframes many customers pay to the peak load, rather than the average, so anything that shaves those peaks can save a lot of money.

Hope you enjoy this show, sponsored by IBM.